My favorite of this genre lately is Jeffrey Steingarten’s writeup of Gwyneth Paltrow in Vogue a couple of years ago. Excerpts:

I used to work with a woman who was a badass statistician and who looked (and more or less dressed) like a Barbie doll. She wasn’t a prof but would guest lecture pretty often. And as much as her style goes against the grain for me, I have to admit it was fun to see her stand in front of a room full of dismissive…

Good thing it wasn’t built on the rule of the auxiliary verb in passive voice.

I just finished it too. GUTTED. Plus I want that shirt.

I have updated this concern to “How do you sleep at night with that kind of carbon footprint?”

Even more puzzling is that evangelicals would embrace him when back last summer he publicly rejected a central tenet of Christianity—that we all fall short and require forgiveness—when he told Anderson Cooper “Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness if I am not making mistakes? I work hard, I’m an honorable…

I heard that as “born an Afghan.” Which is also wrong, but at least makes slightly more sense.

And the British Invasion, by a lot of thinking, was essentially a way of taking black American music and running it through an Anglo-Saxon filter so it could be reimported for the white kids.

Dizzying! I love it.

But even then, there were 17th-century Mexican composers writing very European-sounding high baroque church music under the influence of the Spaniards, so what do we do with that? It’s an endlessly interesting subject to me, the way musical influences are constantly intertwining. And while it gets muddied up with when…

That stream’s not so pure either. If you look back to the oldest country artists - Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe - they were all hugely influenced by Delta blues and and other musical styles that were traditionally black. Music, more than most art forms, seems to be one where different streams are drawn…

Yeah, I’m really liking the podcast. The West Wing is my political detox. I just got a “Bartlet for America” shirt for summer wear.

Oh, John Spencer. I miss you.

I was just coming here to post a pic of Estelle. I could look at her all day.

I know! He’s inarguably among the most overprivileged beings on this planet, and there he is screeching that he’s been treated unfairly over a run-of-the-mill accountability check.

I can understand this experience so well. It takes time to disentangle the threads of influence and figure stuff out. What I can’t understand is all the kids I grew up with in another part of rural Georgia - by the time we hit high school in the mid-70s we were all hippie wannabes and political liberals, and even the…

This was great, thanks. The other weird parallel in history, as others have pointed out, is the terrified argument against “unisex” bathrooms put forth by Phyllis Schafly and others when we were trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified.

I don’t know that one, but I’ll be down that way later in the summer so I’ll hunt it up for sure. Thanks—

Thanks! I have a thing for regional soft drinks in general (Ale-8-1 is another favorite from this part of the country), but Cheerwine is the best of the best. I’ve never even seen it at a rest stop, so that was well played.

They’re from northeastern Kentucky, hillbilly country, not the deep south. I’m not saying there’s no racism there, but it’s a very different culture, and wanting to dissociate from poverty is likely to be more about stereotyping than race.